Urban Clustering

These are some of the views and reports relevant to our readers that caught our attention this week.

Show Them the Money, Why Giving Cash Helps Alleviate Poverty
Foreign Affairs
Every year, wealthy countries spend billions of dollars to help the world’s poor, paying for cows, goats, seeds, beans, textbooks, business training, microloans, and much more. Such aid is designed to give poor people things they can’t afford or the tools and skills to earn more. Much of this aid undoubtedly works. But even when assistance programs accomplish things, they often do so in a tremendously expensive and inefficient way. Part of this is due to overhead, but overhead costs get far more attention than they deserve. More worrisome is the actual price of procuring and giving away goats, textbooks, sacks of beans, and the like. Most development agencies either fail to track their costs precisely or keep their accounting books confidential, but a number of candid organizations have opened themselves up to scrutiny. Their experiences suggest that delivering stuff to the poor is a lot more expensive than one might expect.

2015: The year there will be more cellular connections than people
GIGAOM
At the end of March, there were 6.8 billion mobile connections around the globe, meaning there were more than 9.3 cellular links for every 10 people living on the planet, according to Ericsson’s latest Mobility Report. That puts the world on pace to reach 100 percent mobile penetration in 2015, meaning the number of mobile connections will surpass the population. That doesn’t mean we’ll see every man, woman in child in the world’s estimated population of 7.2 billion using a mobile phone. Mobile penetration is definitely increasing in developing markets – Africa and India led the way in new connections in Q1 – but the concentration of mobile devices is still centered on developed markets. Europe, Asia, the Middle East and North America have already exceeded the 100 percent penetration mark.

Call for Applications!

The Summer Institute 2015 -- Reform Communication: Leadership, Strategy and Stakeholder Alignment. In this 10-day program, participants will develop the skills required to bring about real change, leading to development results. Learn more >>

Subscribe by email

E-mail: *

Enter your email below to receive email notifications when new content is posted